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How do I figure out an individual Twitter status URL?

I have been using Twhirl as my Twitter client and am pretty happy with it, but I'm baffled by one thing: recently someone sent me an email that included a URL on Twitter that took me to a page that had just a single tweet on it. How did they do that?

Dave's Answer:

A little known feature of Twitter is that each and every "tweet", or message sent on the system, has a unique identifying number and that if you know that number, you can actually construct a URL that shows just that one message on the page.

The URLs look like this:

http://twitter.com/FilmBuzz/statuses/862509661

The Twitter account in question is FilmBuzz and the unique status update ID is 862509661.

But how did I figure that number out? Turns out that it's the time stamp on a Twitter message that links to the unique URL for that tweet, so in Twhirl, I clicked on the following:

As you can see, I'm going to click on the timestamp that says "about 7h ago", at which point Twhirl hands the URL to my Web browser, Flock, and I see:

The URL of that page tells me what I want to know, and I can now easily copy and paste that URL onto a Web page (like this!) or into an email message to some Beatles fans I know (or, perhaps, someone who is an Emerson, Lake and Palmer fan, one or the other).

Hope that helps. It certainly isn't an intuitive path to get the answer!

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Categorized: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Social Network Help (Article 8399)
Tagged: micro-blogging, twhirl, twitter
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Comments

Thanks Dave. I was wondering how to do that. How do you come up with these great questions all the time?

Posted by: Rob McNealy at July 19, 2008 9:03 PM

Good post. This has to be one the most unclear features on Twitter.

This works from TweetDeck too. Just doubleclick the time-stamp to open the page in your browser.

Posted by: Sam Stone at April 16, 2009 1:22 AM

Thanks so much! I couldn't even find the answer in the Twitter help section!

Posted by: Claire at May 23, 2009 3:14 PM

Thank you!! I was wondering how to figure that out... actually thought it would be more difficult, ha

Posted by: Ali at October 17, 2009 2:03 PM

pictures are fine but its allot better to put the tweet directly into the page and make it so users can interact and reply to it

Posted by: Carter Cole at January 24, 2010 7:58 PM

awesome. thanks

Posted by: eighty at February 9, 2010 1:15 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!